Dawn, Delayed

The long, strange trip NASA's Dawn spacecraft has travelled to reach the stars took another unexpected detour this week, as NASA announced a broken launch pad crane will delay the probe's planned June 30 launch by at least one week.

Florida Today reports NASA halted the countdown for Dawn last week, after a crane at launch pad 17A broke down. The crane is used to hoist the stages of the Delta II launch vehicle (shown above), as well as the spacecraft itself, into position.

Fortunately, the breakdown caused no damage to the launch vehicle, or Dawn itself... but the needed repairs to the crane will mean a liftoff date sometime in early July.  The actual date has not been finalized.

It isn't the first time the Dawn mission has hit a snag. As Aero-News reported, NASA cancelled the mission outright in March 2006 -- after delaying it in January -- citing cost overruns, budgetary woes, and technical faults that plagued the project for years. However, the agency later granted Dawn a reprieve, after receiving several protests from the scientific community.

Once it is eventually launched, Dawn will visit the asteroids Ceres and Vesta, contained in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They are two of the largest such bodies in the solar system, and scientists hope the two heavenly bodies will reveal clues about the formation of the solar system.

FMI: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/